


The Words

by mab



Category: Slings & Arrows
Genre: Accidental Drug Use, Community: hc_bingo, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, LSD, Mental Health Issues, Post-Series, Self-Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-19
Updated: 2017-01-19
Packaged: 2018-09-18 13:14:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9386831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mab/pseuds/mab
Summary: For the 'drugged' prompt.'was it cheating on your current breakdown to think of your last?'





	

The words won’t stop moving on the page. Geoffrey closes his eyes, squeezes them shut tight, even, and digs the heels of his hands into his eyes for good measure. He peaks one eye open, the other still covered like he’s looking at an eye chart. For a moment, the four-hundred-year-old words stay still. Then, they glow. ‘Thy’ seems to rise and float above the others, a perfectly useless word, especially when it’s covering more descriptive ones.

“Fuck!” Geoffrey shouts at them, hands slamming down on the desk on either side of the play. “Stay still you fuckers,” he hisses, wholly unhappy by how the sting from hitting the desk fades away up his arms much too quickly. And the action doesn't make the words tumble into their proper places as he'd hoped. The bastards.

He’s having a disturbing amount of trouble trying to remember what play exactly he’s reading. Or trying to read. If the words would stay still. It feels, sickly, like he is reading and thinking of them all at once, all of Shakespeare’s words running together into infinity in front of him, filling his head up and bursting out in insipid dribbles like ‘thy’...And the weight of all those words and clever turns of phrases sit just on the edge of his tongue balanced there, ready to be said and shared and loved and worshiped, if only he can get the words on the page to stay still and stop turning funny colors. 

Once, he lost nearly everything because the weight of a play and of another mind laid over his and the punishing force of a betrayal (three betrayals, really: Ellen, Oliver, and finally --even more painful-- Shakespeare himself who flew out of Geoffrey’s head and abandoned him to stare, pale and empty, into expectant faces), but that time didn’t kill him. Maybe it took a healthy chunk of his sanity with it, along with his reputation, but he lived through the cuffs and pills and tiny cups of water. 

He’s not sure he can deal with this new weight on his tongue, the sheer understanding and love and passion…it’s—it’s---it’s too much and _the words won’t stay still_! 

He’s up and out of his chair, rushing for the door, shoulder colliding with the door frame violently enough to spin him halfway around, before he can have a more coherent thought than: out! out! He’s not sure if he needs out of his office (his new office that smells like paint and newness and that’s wrong, so wrong, theater is old and real and heavy, not particle board shelving that’s going to break apart the first time Geoffrey bangs into it on accident or kicks it on purpose) or out of his head or out of the building, that is just as new smelling as his office, and just as flimsy in Geoffrey’s nightmares (he’s sure it will all crash down around him like a papier-mâché sculpture, fuck it’s too nice and too perfect for his life to keep it up for much, but fucking Christ on a cracker, he didn’t think it would all end like this, now, with him having a final psychotic break while simply sitting in his damn office with the first play only half cast!) and he finds himself shoving into the bathroom between his and Anna’s office. 

 

It’s small, the new bathroom. Two stalls and two sinks (unisex, Anna called it, but that just meant no urinal so Anna wouldn’t ever walk in on Geoffrey with his dick in his hand). Small though it is, the bathroom does have a lock on it (he and Anna tend to need freak out spaces, like he’s doing now, so the lock was a must), and Geoffrey snaps the lock closed with force. Come to think of force, his ears are still ringing from slamming the door. He must be making a racket. No good. Attention right now will remind him of pale faces staring up through the stage lights, of half dead Barbara struggling with the adage ‘the show must go on’ and Ellen, beautiful, fucked up Ellen in the wings, watching him with love even though she could not have loved him, not truly, not if she---

Geoffrey staggers over to the sinks, swatting at the air near his ears like that will push those thoughts away --was it cheating on your current breakdown to think of your last?-- and manages turns the faucet on. Fills the sink half full of ice cold water and shoves his entire face into it, most of his head. He’d get his shoulders in if he could, his whole body, let the icy water suck him in bit by bit. The water is cold and as thick as oil. It is wonderful.

He counts to ten. Twenty. He really doesn’t want to go insane again. Not now. Not when his life is actually worth living for the first time since his original breakdown, since ‘Geoffrey, I’m sorry, I have to tell you something.’ He doesn’t even have a cast to put all those words into, his new life with Her is only a half formed maquette, and Jesus, He can’t say all the words himself! 

His counting hits forty and he can’t hold his breath anymore, almost inhales water before he remembers to stand up, hair flicking water into the mirror, the floor around him. He looks in the mirror, it’s big, the whole wall above the sinks, and it is melting, the drips of water have somehow melted the glass in little rivers and the whole thing is running, turning into a sad impression of a Dali clock meeting bargain priced interior design. 

_Ah, there:_ this is familiar a singular thought, a singular feeling: rage. Why does the mirror get to melt away (too solid flesh) and dissolve itself from its responsibilities? 

Half liquid half solid glass falls into the sink with a sound that is not unlike a piano. Geoffrey punches it again with his other hand to get some control back, to get the shattered dew and liquid reflection back for its ability to change. Punches more to get away from the wild-eyed maniac staring back at him, jealous of a melting mirror. Loses count of the punches, after a while.

“Geoffrey!” The door calls.

He spins. The door bulges into the bathroom with each pound, pulls back with each call of his name, like a backwards wolf inhaling down the little piggy's door instead of blowing it down.

Silence buzzes in his ears, sounds like the hushed pre-show murmurs he used to love and loathe because he loved them. He doesn’t answer the door. He’s not crazy, he’s not having a breakdown (again!) he will _not_ talk to doors.

His legs turn to wet cardboard on him. He sits with a thud, not really sits but falls. He arranges himself better, sitting on wet tiles that are slick with pink diluted blood. The tiles are long and dark: bamboo, Anna had explained. Good for the environment, the architect said. He draws long streaks of blood and liquid mirror. A happy face. If you’re drawing happy faces, you’re not insane again. Writes: the wind is blowing southerly. So he’s not insane. **NO! NO! Not Hamlet**! Not Halmet either, never ever ever fucking again, thank you, not that weight ever again (guilt and grief and power (he has them, he has them eating out of his hand and it is glorious) and grief and frozen with indecision, frozen as he tries to remember his line, then any line, then any fucking _words_ other than ‘shefuckedhimshefuckedhimshefuckedhim’ all run together in one litany). He slides his slick fingers through the words. _Out, damn'd spot!_ , indeed. Never again Halmet.

The door betrays him and opens, and the shock of it makes him take a deep breath in, unaware that he had been holding it as Hamlet tried to take over. Anna has a key in her hand and she’s very pale. So white Geoffrey can almost see the capillaries in her skin, see the little blood cells moving.

Shit, it wasn’t the door talking to him, it was _Anna_. The key to the bathroom lock, he remembers now. She wanted a lock for the bathroom too, but said only if there was a key kept where they both could get to it (only Anna would worry ahead of time about him killing a mirror in a fit of jealous rage because the mirror was able to melt into a dew)...Shit. _Fuck._ “Shit.” He says to her, then, imploringly: “I didn’t talk to the door. I’m not insane.” 

Anna stares at him some more. Did she lose her voice? All those words that were stretched in front of him and balanced on his tongue must have used up all the words they can for the day (or forever?). “I don’t think I can live my life as a _mime_ , Anna,” he tells her, sadly, like he’s failing her. “Can you?” 

She might be able to do it, words aren’t always her friends, he’s seen her when the words are in her head but not in her mouth and it hurts to see them choke her!

Oh. Words. The words are just stuck in her throat (she certainly looks like that, staring at him, the blood and melted dew bastard of a mirror). Maybe he can help with that? Give her some of those that clog up his tongue and brain at all hours on bad days, suffocating him, blotting him out. But he doesn't want her to suffer like that, either. 

Geoffrey jumps to his feet, his left foot slides on the water (or blood, he’s not sure) and he twists it badly trying to right himself, catches the wall to stop from falling. He turns to stare at the bloody handprint he’s left on the cream-colored wall. Well, more a smear than a handprint. It kind of looks like a swan (but fuck no no _no_ swans right now, no swans in Montreal as far as he is concerned, no swans in Canada, no swans in the fucking Northern hemisphere), and he stops to look at it. 

Maybe it is the way the wall is breathing at him, bulging slightly in the middle. Or the blood swan. But he cannot look away. He reaches out, draws a winding line from the palm print. Dips his right index finger in blood over his left hand’s knuckles and writes:

_**Only my blood speaks to you in my veins.** _

Not quite right, he frowns, since the blood isn’t in his veins anymore, is it? He looks at his hands, sees the carnage wrought by the mirror. There’s a small piece of glass sticking out of the knuckle of his right middle finger. He pulls it out, watching how the light catches along the clean edge. It almost turns the bloody side into a stained-glass, but no, the blood, his blood is too dark no light can get through.

“Geoffrey?” It takes a moment for him to realize that it isn’t the wall talking to him, nor the glass, but Anna. Her voice sounds strange, like she’s swallowed some of the dewy glass mirror, but he’s almost happy she’s gotten this word out. She’d make a terrible mime (or maybe a really good one, and that’s just sad as being terrible at it), and he lets out a dry sob of relief, grateful to hear her voice. 

He shudders at the sound he made, biting his bottom lip, hard enough that he can taste blood. He will not start fucking crying during _this_ breakdown, thank you. But he’s so glad she has words, and...He’s seen that look on her face before, when she thought he wasn’t looking. Dear Anna was always much better about hiding her ‘Geoffrey is mad as a fucking hatter’ (never as mad as fucking _Hamlet_ , he likes to think they all refused to put him and that Dane in the same sentence ever again, even in their heads) look than most of the others, but he’s caught her, sometimes, looking at him like he is breakable. Like he has already shattered. It always scares him when he sees that look from her, because if she was willing to risk looking like that, then Geoffrey really is in a bad, bad way. Not usually drawing on the floor and walls with his own blood bad way, just unwashed and manic and talking to a ghost/no one maybe, but she always at least tried to hide that she was looking at him like that, and now she's not, and Geoffrey idly wonders if he'll get put in a straitjacket this time (the one nurse in the asylum that put up with his bullshit and spit it back at him told him repeatedly one bad night --when all Geoffrey could do was pace, no words to match his rhythm on the floor boards, the Bard was gone from him forever-- said that they didn't like to use them, straitjackets, anymore whenever possible, because the one thing he could ask, over and over was if he wore a men's large, what size would his straitjacket be?). 

“Are you all right?” Again, her voice is funny, funny in a way that makes Geoffrey want to cry, rather than laugh. She is terrified, right now, he can feel her fear in his chest, tight and hot and solid, wedged right between his heart and his ribcage. He can taste the waxy ridge of cheap paper cups and the weight of the pills inside them on his tongue, in that tone. His wrists tingle (soft restraints, meant to protect him like taking his shoelaces and belt was meant to protect him – it wasn’t, it wouldn’t, it was to protect the other person from dealing with messes), all the moisture has left his mouth.

“The words were moving around the page.” Geoffrey confides in her. He feels like he must explain, like he tried to explain to the police that he just wanted to hear a swan chant its doleful hymn all those years ago, but they were too dull to get it. Anna isn’t dull. She gets the arts, that madness and the thin thread about to snap are beautiful, Geoffrey _knows_ she does in his heart, so maybe she can get this. That he had to kill the mirror. 

He waves a hand at the mirror, shattered and no longer melting, though the pieces catch the light in such a way that he can only stare for a long moment before saying: “The mirror was melting into a dew and the words were so heavy.”

Anna nods and looks like she's halfway humoring him, halfway curious (and he loves her for that, her curiosity) when she asks: “Is that why you broke it?”

Geoffrey nods. He's not sure he can explain it all, not in words. He could show her, he could---

“Anna!” A new voice calls and Geoffrey twitches from the surprise of it. 

Geoffrey watches her turn, to look at the man calling her. 

“Did you eat any cookies here today?” The voice asks.

The person inquiring about cookies steps into the doorway, so Geoffrey can see him, though Anna tries to block him (protecting what’s left of Geoffrey’s shredded dignity, he doesn’t have the heart to tell her that it’s been gone for a long, long time, since he jumped into the faux grave of a drowned woman that might of killed herself). Part of him wants to point out his lack of dignity, but part of him is glad that he didn’t just imagine a voice yelling down their hallway about cookies, and that relief overwhelms all other feelings. There are only so many insane things he can think and do before he turns his own coat around and asks for Anna to tie the sleeves for him. He'd get blood on them, and shouldn't his hands hurt, anyway, by now? 

Oh. The man is Eric, Geoffrey realizes. ' _Right! See! ,Anna!_ ' He wants to yell, ' _Crazy broken dew glass people don’t remember their employee’s names! I'm fine!_ ' But Geoffrey fights the urge, because this whole cookie question seems important. Important enough for Eric to come running down the hall asking questions about them. Eric is their new director, working on a play in their small stage. Money. Something about smaller work being generating a steady income while he works on staging a play he can't remember the name of. There had been convincing reasons to turn the warehouse into two stages and offices, charts and other people and ' _oh we can afford it, let's do it_ ' and then boom: bamboo tile and particleboard shelves and newness. 

Eric’s eyes are huge as he looks between Anna and Geoffrey, and the carnage of their Executive Bathroom.

“Oh, shit,” He says, then: “Hey, Geoffrey, how are you feeling?”

Geoffrey is reminded of hospital smells and nurses and cops that make you take off your belt and shoes and think they know how you’re feeling but can’t possibly know by asking for shoelaces, by speaking in that tone, they’re driving you further into your own hell. He reaches out to shut the bathroom door, but Anna puts her body in the way without even looking at him, or acknowledging his attempt to shut himself away.

Geoffrey holds onto it with his right hand, tight as he can. He could shove her away and get the door closed, he’s positive of his ability to do so, but he’s not violent to people that aren’t named Darren, he’s never violent towards women for fucks sake, and (and there are no swans around except for the one, blood Rorschach on the wall), and anyway, she’ll just unlock the door and he’ll push her away and lock it and she’ll unlock it and then they’ll be in a loop forever, and he won’t hear why Eric is asking about fucking cookies. The cookies seem important.

“What did you do?” Anna asks Eric. Her tone makes Geoffrey want to go hide under the sinks.

“Uh, well—I did some reading...on the internet. Geoffrey, did you eat any cookies in the rehearsal room?”

From under the sinks (hard to get down here, he's nearly lying flat, but at least he’s further from Anna’s considerable wrath – _**And though she be but little, she is fierce.**_ , Geoffrey writes on the underside of the sink, blood still wet on his hands in places, his knuckles oozing more blood ink for him) Geoffrey answers: “Ellen cooked this morning.”

Which is an answer if you know Ellen. Umm. She was still at home, still settling their lives for him (all her stuff, and he loved her for it, the way she could hold onto things for years where Geoffrey can’t hold his sanity for the day!). For a minute, Geoffrey is distracted thinking of Ellen and her cooking, cursing as she burned herself, not willing to admit that she was a terrible cook, Ellen and her pale skin and rosy ni—

“You put what in the cookies!?” Anna yells, pulling Geoffrey back into the moment. He joins the moment by jerking in surprise at the outrage in Ann's voice, braining himself on the exposed pipe under the sink.

“Uh...it was supposed to help the cast bond.”

“I ate your cast's bonds?” Geoffrey asks, frowning at himself. That’s rude. 

Eric gives a laugh that Geoffrey is intimately familiar with. The ‘I’m just kidding, I’m not a danger to myself or others, officer’ laugh. Nervous and high. Near hysterical. “No…How many did you eat?”

“Just one. I didn’t think they were important.” There is a desperate note in his voice, a need for Eric to know he wouldn’t have eaten the cookies if he knew they were important.

“Get out of here.” Anna says to Eric, her voice low and dangerous. 

Eric leaves. Geoffrey tells himself he’s curled up under the sinks because it’s comfortable and not because Anna is fucking terrifying when she gets her words right. He underlines fierce as she steps into the bathroom, her heals clicking over bamboo tile and crushing broken mirror that seems to have reformed into something more solid than a dew.

She crouches down just out of reach (his or hers, he’s not sure). “Did you hear that?” She asks, she’s still mad, but not at him, he doesn’t think, and, more importantly, she no longer sounds like she’s talking him off a ledge neither of them can see. 

Geoffrey smiles at her, a real, happy smile. “You’ll find your words here.” 

Anna blinks a few times, smiling back at him after a moment, confused now, not worried. “Eric’s cookies were, laced with LSD.”

Then, it hits him and his eyes burn with relief, he feels like he could float away in this moment. “So I’m just hallucinating?” The part that sticks in his throat: ‘ _tell me I’m not breaking again, please Anna,_ ' remains unsaid, but his voice is high with hope. 

She sees the stuck words, hears them anyway, acknowledges them with a smile, and nods. “Yes.”

"Oh." Geoffrey says, then: "Huh." Because he doesn’t know how to feel, other than relief.

"Can you get out from under the sinks?"

Fierce Anna is gone, her statue strength still there, but she's no longer likely to kill him with laser beam eyes. He does as she asks, crawling out from under the sinks, using the counter to lever himself up, which pushes more glass into his hands and the bathroom is a sparkling, shining mess. He blinks at his destruction and looks at her, unsure what to do.

"Should I call Ellen?" 

He looks down at his hands, dripping blood and sparkling in places, then back at Anna. He shakes his head. "Not yet," he says, indicating the room at large with his left hand. "Let me clean up first."

Anna looks at him like he is a child, like she does when he says things like: ' _Why can't I paint ‘ **No FUCKING MUSICALS,EVER** ' on the front of building? It's my building!_' after he reads about the fucking East Hastings movie. He secretly likes that look, and he honestly doesn't know why. 

"Maybe we should start with your hands. " 

Geoffrey realizes why he likes that look from her right then, as she leads him to the sink to wash away the worst of the blood, to look at his wounds and decide if he really did himself damage (he doesn't think so, but again, there is a distinct lack of pain, only awareness of the burn of torn skin, a not unpleasant sensation, really). She gives him that look like he's a child, but then she holds his hand (literally as like now, or figuratively) and leads him through what must be done to keep doing what he loves, what he needs, and that kind of compassion is beautiful to behold. 

So he lets her wash his hands. To be honest, he spends most of the time watching the water sparkle, or the pink swirl in the basin that is his blood leaking and diluting down back into water. Anna's hands are sure and firm, but there is a gentleness in her that he gets from no one else. 

After washing, she takes him to sit in his office and pulls over a desk lap and pulls bits of glass out of his hands. He's still and calm for most of it, his panic washed away into this weird warmth that lets him just _be_ for as long as Anna needs to clean his hands. 

"You really should be at hospital right now." 

Geoffrey raises an eyebrow at that, and she laughs. "Do I tell them I was drugged on accident and the mirror attacked me? Or leave out the drugs part and let them fit me for a straitjacket?"

"Maybe in a few hours," she gives. “If the bleeding doesn’t stop.” She uses gauze from the first aid kit to wrap his hands for a few minutes, before asking: "Didn't you attack the mirror?" with an exquisite deadpan delivery. 

And Geoffrey laughs. He laughs so hard tears burn his eyes and he lets them fall, laughs until his sides ache. Because he's not any more mad than he was yesterday, just a bit drugged and he can breathe for the first time since the drugs kicked in. 

He sits there and recites any bit of words that are still hovering heavy and full in the air. The words are always there, he knows, but they aren't a muffling blanket of snow to clog him up and slowly snuff the life out of him under their avalanche. They are part of the air, the words, His words, and Geoffrey knows he's one of the few lucky people that can truly see them, hear their music and their love and their passion and their hate and their desire and their envy and their madness. He can see them and he can say them and make others feel them. 

So he shares the words with Anna. At some point, he's gotten up and grabs a set of permanent markers from his desk, and he starts writing the words on the walls of his office as he tells her them, tumbling between the four walls up and down and through all the texts that he loves and his loved for almost as long as he's been alive. He writes, _**Go to your bosom; Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.**_ in green marker above that flimsy particleboard shelf. 

He turns to Anna, his smile bright, her smile almost blinding. He holds out the uncapped marker. She takes it, moves to a bit of wall near the corner, chest height, and begins to write and recite _her_ favorite words. 

If she cries a bit, he's not telling anyone. If he groans when, finally, the pain in his hands hit him, she won't tell anyone either.   
He won't even lie to himself and say it is the pain that gets his eyes wet.

**Author's Note:**

> I really do know people who have had LSD in cookie form...they knew what they were taking, though. So they're one up on Geoffrey. 
> 
> Sorry for the italics and bold abuse. It's just, Geoffrey likes to _emphasize_ his words so much, I couldn't help it!


End file.
